Entries for September 2008

The hottest issue at the National Association for College Admission Counseling's (NACAC) 2008 annual conference last week in Seattle was the future of standardized testing. This debate was triggered by the release of the Report of the NACAC Commission on the Use of Standardized Tests in Undergraduate Admission that made recommendations on how the SAT, ACT, and other standardized tests should be used in college admissions. The session at the conference that discussed this report drew the largest crowd by far. The report itself stressed that colleges should use standardized tests responsibly and "that a 'one size fits all' approach for the use of standardized tests in undergraduate admission does not reflect the realities facing our nation's many and varied colleges and universities."

However, it remains to be seen what the outcome of this report will be because it was far more noteworthy for what it did not say. It did not call for colleges to abandon the use of the SAT and ACT test in admissions or push for more colleges to go "test optional," as many have recently. Many high school counselors had hoped that the NACAC report would be more forceful in criticizing the SAT and ACT tests. It was unclear whether any colleges that currently require either the SAT and ACT for admission will now become "test optional." In fact, the admission deans on the conference panel who were from schools that currently require the test—including Harvard University, the University of Connecticut, the University of Washington, and Georgetown University—implied they were unlikely to stop requiring the SAT or ACT in the immediate future.

The National Association for College Admission Counseling just released its long-awaited Report of the NACAC Commission on the Use of Standardized Tests in Undergraduate Admission that makes recommendations on how the SAT, ACT, and other standardized tests should be used in college admissions.

Our use of SAT and ACT test scores in the America's Best Colleges rankings is one area that the commission—made up of college admissions deans and high school counselors—weighs in on. It says:

The Commission believes that, as tests designed to provide information about individuals to colleges and universities, the SAT and ACT were never designed as measures of the quality of an institution of higher education. Accordingly, the Commission encourages U.S. News to eliminate test scores as a measure of institutional quality.

Assessing the educational quality of colleges relative to their costs is becoming a more difficult task, especially given the growing complexities of financial aid. Yet, with the cost of colleges increasing faster than most family incomes, value has become a key factor for students in selecting where to go to school.

To make it easier for families that qualify for financial aid to determine values, U.S. News has produced lists of the best college values in 10 academic categories. And because U.S News believes that the best values are found among schools that are above average educationally, only colleges in the top-half of their America's Best Colleges 2009 edition rankings category were considered for the evaluation.

Many people believe that an ethnically diverse student body enhances the education of every pupil. A school is truly diverse if there are many different ethnic groups enrolled on campus and those groups have around the same percentage of students enrolled. That means, if a school has one ethnic group that makes up a very large percentage of its student body, it's not very diverse, even though there may be other ethnic groups represented in small percentages on campus.

U.S. News has once again analyzed economic diversity at colleges. Economic diversity provides one insight into what the composition of the student body is actually like to students who are interested in applying. Economic diversity also continues to receive growing attention as a social issue in higher ed, particularly at some of the top schools that haven't traditionally enrolled large numbers of students from low-income families. It has been argued by many that colleges and universities should make a better effort to educate these students, given education's role in social mobility.

How is economic diversity determined? U.S. News looks at the percentage of enrolled undergraduate students receiving Pell grants at each school. Many experts say that the percentage of students receiving Pell grants is the best available gauge of how many low-income undergrads there are on a given campus. Pell grants are awarded from a federally funded program that gives need-based grants to low-income students and are most often given to undergrads with family incomes under $20,000.